Manufacturing industries build products according to repeatable procedures that use standardized quantities of raw materials. In essence, products are manufactured according to recipes. A recipe may describe the quantity of raw materials used and the way the materials are combined to create the final product. In one simple example, a process control entity such as an industrial bakery may follow a basic recipe that lists all the ingredients and procedural steps needed to make cookies. In such an example, the recipe may define the amounts of particular ingredients, the quantity of time spent mixing the ingredients, and the time and temperature for baking. It should be understood that recipes may also be used to define other processes such as, for example, a sequence of on-off type operations of a single piece of equipment. For example, in the cookie making process discussed above, a recipe may be used to define the operations performed by the mixer alone. In such an example, the recipe may include a first mixing step where the mixer mixes a first group of ingredients for a first length of time and a second mixing step where the mixer mixes the first ingredients with a second group of ingredients for a second amount of time. Still other recipe types may also be used without departing from the scope of the present invention.
Products such as Wonderware's Recipe Manager Plus assist in creating and organizing recipes used to run various processes. As shown and discussed therein, prior recipe management systems relied on spreadsheet-based user interfaces in which users could define and create recipe templates. Although helpful for creating a set of instructions (recipe) for running a supervisory control routine, the grid-based recipe configuration systems are not very user-friendly.
In addition, conventional recipe management systems model pieces of equipment and recipes together so that a recipe model is tied to a piece of equipment. As a result, recipe models can only be used to run a recipe on one piece of equipment. In addition, multiple equipment models are required to run multiple recipes on the same piece of equipment.